Archive for June 21st, 2020

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 83

Sunday, June 21st, 2020

Science Sunday!

No grand unifying theme today, just some things that popped up in my recommendations that I thought were interesting.

“The Penetrating Eye”. From 1970, a documentary about the scanning electron microscope produced by Eli Lilly.

Bonus: “Nuclear Propulsion In Space”, a 1968 joint production of NASA and the old Atomic Energy Commission about experimental nuclear reactors for space propulsion.

There’s a lot of “The Future We Could Have Had” in this video, including discussion of how a manned Mars mission would work. It also includes some nifty reactor test footage.

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Obit watch: June 21, 2020.

Sunday, June 21st, 2020

Michael Drosnin, “Bible Code” guy.

“The Bible Code” opens with a stunning moment: The author, having discovered a biblical passage suggesting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel would be assassinated, hops on a plane in 1994 to deliver a letter of warning. The message doesn’t alter the course of events — Mr. Rabin was shot and killed a year later — but, as Mr. Drosnin writes, it was “dramatic confirmation” of the Bible code.
That may sound like an Indiana Jones plot, but “The Bible Code” had its roots in science. In the early 1990s, the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips and his colleagues performed an experiment in which they laid out the 304,805 letters of the Torah like a giant crossword puzzle and then performed a “skip-code” computer search. They discovered uncanny combinations. “Kennedy” appeared near the word “Dallas.” Hitler’s name, written upside down, appeared 20 rows from “Nazi,” written backward. And so on.
The findings were published in 1994 in the journal Statistical Science. Mr. Drosnin based his book on that research, adding discoveries of his own.
Many critics found the book unscientific, arbitrary and curiously weighted toward people and events relevant to an American living in the 20th century. Skeptics demonstrated that “Moby-Dick,” or a phone book for that matter, would reveal intriguing word groupings if one went looking for them. Mr. Rips himself denounced Mr. Drosnin’s interpretation of his work.

…

Mr. Drosnin offered more revelations in “The Bible Code II” (2002), another best seller, in which he claimed the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center had been predicted and warned that the world might have only three years left to avoid Armageddon. Then came “The Bible Code III” (2010), but by that time the novelty had worn off; it did not make the best-seller list.
Still, Mr. Drosnin had a high batting average as an author. Of his four books, three were best sellers, including the first, “Citizen Hughes” (1985), a portrait of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes as revealed through stolen office memos.

Posted in Books, History, Obits, Stupid | 1 Comment »